Software collaboration site GitHub was hit by another DDoS attack on Tuesday morning that made the website unavailable to many users for several hours.
The GitHub platform had already suffered a major DDoS attack in March. In that case, the attacker took advantage of the redirection of users of other websites on the Internet. The attackers placed malicious JavaScript code on the pages of these websites that was responsible for redirecting their visitors to GitHub.
Visitors tried to access various websites on the Internet, which were used as DDoS gunners. These websites specifically used code that instructed the browsers of the visitors of these sites to connect to GitHub.com every two seconds. The technique allowed the attackers to generate “an extremely large amount of traffic,” according to researcher Anthr@x from Insight-labs.
The previous DDoS attack in March was carried out to hit two popular Github projects, GreatFire and CN-NYTimes, which are two anti-censorship tools used to circumvent censorship in China and thwart the Great Firewall of China.
This time, the DDoS attack appears to be a consequence of the platform’s decision to remove Chinese censorship circumvention software.
On August 22, an open source project called ShadowSocks was removed from GitHub, the author explained that the police contacted him and asked him to stop working on the software and remove it from GitHub. Shadowsocks is a secure SOCKS5 proxy plug-in protocol for Internet users and is used to bypass China’s Great Firewall.
According to the organization GreatFire.org, another repository recently removed from GitHub, GoAgent, another tool used for Chinese censorship.
“The Github repo GoAgent was removed today (Aug. 25, 2015). GoAgent was the most popular circumvention tool in China. It relied on Google App Engine to tunnel traffic across the GFW. It was hosted on Google Code and later moved to Github.
The author phuslu deleted the repo without explanation, but changed his account description to “Everything that has a beginning has an end,” GreatFire.org reports.
